Article 607 of alt.society.anarchy:
Path: ccs.itd.umich.edu!lsa.umich.edu!caen!uunet!mcsun!ieunet!ccvax.ucd.ie!x551_003
From: x551_003@ccvax.ucd.ie
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Why is anarchism relevant
Message-ID: <1992Dec14.114016.50026@ccvax.ucd.ie>
Date: 14 Dec 92 11:40:16 GMT
Organization: University College Dublin
Lines: 317
Anarchism to-day
This is a copy of an article originally printed in the Irish
anarchist magazine Workers Solidarity (34). Workers
Solidarity can be contacted at WSM, PO Box 1528, Dublin 8,
Ireland.
AT THE MOMENT the "Socialist Movement" has all but
collapsed. Despite the fact that high unemployment, war and
mass starvation would point to the need for a coherent anti-
capitalist alternative most socialists are confused and
demoralised. The reason is simple, both the reformist and
Leninist parties are paying for their legacy of betrayal of
socialism in this century. What they conceived socialism to
be has been totally discredited. As anarchists it is
important to realise that their are both advantages and
drawbacks to these developments.
The vast majority of those that referred to themselves as socialists
saw the Stalinist countries as being ahead of capitalism, a large
amount even went so far as to refer to these regimes as "actually
existing socialism". To these people the collapse of these regimes
has resulted in the belief that socialism itself cannot work. To
anarchists there is no such problem, we realised that the USSR
stopped moving towards socialism when the Bolsheviks destroyed
workers democracy between 1918 and 1921.
IS SOCIALISM DEAD?
The fact that most of yesterdays 'socialists' are now saying
socialism is no longer on the agenda is and will have a major effect
on the level of struggle in society over the next few years. Most
of those workers who were activists in unions and campaigns were
either members of the various state socialist groups or were broadly
sympathetic to them. Many of these people are affected by the
inevitable demoralisation of seeing their parties disintegrate.
In the ideal situation we anarchists would be in the position to
move in and fill this gap. We would be able to get across the
argument that it is not socialism that has collapsed but rather
reformism, Leninism and Stalinism. We could say that anarchism
demonstrates that there is no authoritarian way to socialism. In
reality however the anarchist movement is much too small in most
countries to be able to get across these arguments on a mass basis.
Rather those few small organisations like ourselves are trying to
make what impact we can.
This means that although it is no easier to put across anarchist
politics to people searching for an alternative to capitalism there
are now far fewer people looking for such an alternative. This is
the problem we face in the short term.
LABOUR PARTY BLUES
Those groups who drew their traditions from Lenin and Stalin are
already collapsing or have collapsed. A few who have the tradition
of not being such hard line Leninists are trying to defend Lenin
from anarchist criticism. That other large 'socialist' tradition of
Social Democracy (or labourism) is also in deep trouble. The
reasons for this are not hard to find.
The labour parties always accommodated that section of the ruling
class who saw stability as being insured through policies of co-
operation with the trade union bureaucracy. The labour parties were
the creation of the trade union bureaucrats and fought to reduce
class antagonism through the introduction of the welfare state,
arbitration procedures, national plans between the bosses and the
union bureaucrats etc. In the past the far-left convinced large
numbers of activists to join the labour parties either to transform
them or expose the party leadership.
Internationally these policies meet with various degrees of success
from the end of the second world war on as a mixture of expanding
capitalism and the threat of industrial unrest led to most states
taking up many parts of the Labour parties programme. By the late
70's however this expansion had slowed or stopped and the Labour
parties where they remained in power led the offensive on behalf of
the capitalists to drive down wages and living standards. In
Britain this offensive was continued by the Thatcher government
which held power in England throughout the eighties. In many other
European countries and in Australia it was the Social Democrats who
carried out the cuts in the 80's.
A DECADE OF DEFEATS
Naturally enough workers resisted this offensive and won a few
initial victories. The trade union bureaucracy however turned
increasingly to trying to work out plans which would limit job
losses rather than outright opposition to these cuts. Strikes like
those in Liverpool, the printers at Wapping, the P+O workers and the
national miners strike of 1984 were isolated, with the bureaucrats
doing all they could to prevent sympathy action. The left in the
unions was unwilling to fight the bureaucrats so such strikes lost
despite heroic efforts by those on strike.
The lesson most workers took was that job losses could not be fought
against, the 80's in most of the western countries was a decade
where defeat followed defeat. The left rather then seeing these
losses as coming from their reliance on the Labour party and the
union bureaucrats to led the fightback drew entirely the wrong
lesson. They thought "Thatcherism" represented some sort of new,
undefeatable phenomenon. A variety of theories which sort to
explain that the working class no longer existed or that class
politics were no longer relevant came into being. There was
nothing new in this, in the mid 60's similar ideas that the western
working class had sold out to consumerism abounded, these of course
were smashed by the events of 1968, particularly the general strike
in France.
Most of those on the left who didn't go along with this analysis
were Leninists of one sort or another who looked to the soviet
union as some sort of example. The collapse of the soviet union had
a similar if not larger effect on these people. Thus at the start
of 1992 we find the situation where despite the fact that capitalism
is in obvious trouble there is almost no organised alternative to
it. The radical alternatives of yesterday have become to-days
jokes.
SOME THINGS CHANGE
The collapse of the confidence of the reformist labour parties may
not be final. A British Social Attitudes survey reported in the
Guardian (Nov 20 '91) revealed 83% supported the "Keynesian policy
of fighting unemployment through investing in construction planning"
and 9 out of 10 people wanted more investment in the NHS even if
taxes had to be raised to pay for it. Yet at a time when
Thatcherism has been abandoned as inadequate by the bosses, many on
the left still consider it to have destroyed the whole socialist
project.
In the 80's there were many changes in the composition of the
working class. In the west at least the industrial working class
dwindled as the white collar working class grew. Many of the
largest industrial workplaces were broken up and dispersed commonly
with the aim of weakening the unions involved. In Ireland there are
only 6 sites employing over 1000 people in the same company. For
those who saw socialism as being introduced by steelworkers and
miners wearing cloth caps and clogs this represented a big blow
In Ireland Irish companies have increasingly come to replace
multinationals. Of the top 10 companies by turnover only two (at
positions 5 and 10) are multinationals. In the top 50 there are a
total of 10 multinationals. This demonstrates how the southern
Irish ruling class has successfully established itself as a junior
partner of international capitalism. Those socialists in Ireland
who saw the multi-nationals rather then our native capitalist class
as the main problem in the south are being forced to reconsider.
There is nothing new in all this, throughout his century conditions
have changed for socialists. Similar ideas that socialism was dead
were being thrown around before the struggles of 1968 shook the
world. We have to continually take these changes into account. We
have to continually elaborate our ideas, and test them by involving
our self where-ever there is struggle against the bosses. Any
theory is only as good as the practical guidance it gives in day to
day struggle. One of the most important aspect of any socialist
organisation is the ability to throw out all that is irrelevant (or
wrong) in its tradition.
WHY ANARCHISM?
It is becoming clear that the bulk of what has been referred to as
socialism up to now is in fact nothing of the sort. The vast bulk
of the theory and practise of the last 70 years needs to be thrown
in the bin. Unfortunately most of the Leninist groups are avoiding
such an exercise preparing instead to do a botched plastering job
over the appearing cracks. They have chosen to follow the same
paths as the Communist parties did and will probably suffer a
similar fate.
The vast bulk of those leaving the Leninist and labour parties are
just disappearing from any form of politics or activism. The few
who are trying to continue the anti-capitalist fight in a new way
are making old mistakes. For the most part rather then seeing their
version of socialism as flawed they have come to see capitalism as
triumphant. There is a tradition however which refused to see
socialism as something being imposed by a minority wielding state
power on behalf of a majority. The tradition of anarchism always
rejected both the crude authoritarianism of Leninism and the
reformism of the labour parties.
It is for this reason that we call ourselves anarchists. Anarchism
as a tradition is no doubt flawed, at times even badly flawed but it
has always been better than any of the alternatives on offer.
What's more, it has been capable of the sort of fierce self-
criticism needed to continually develop. Throughout the last 120
years it has always been the anarchist (or a sub-group of
anarchists) that has developed the best position on the events of
the day. Most importantly anarchism unlike reformism, Leninism and
Trotskyism has never imposed dictatorship and massacre on the
working class.
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL
Within the first international, in the last century the anarchists
consistently argued against a turn to reformism and parliamentary
elections. They argued against the view that the state apparatus
could be seized and used to introduce socialism. The introduction
of socialism could only be carried out by the working class itself
not by a minority of revolutionaries acting through the state. They
also argued against the emerging strain within Marxism that argued
that the revolution could only come about if the working class was
under the dictatorship of a minority of intellectuals. With the
advantage of hindsight it is clear that these arguments explain much
of what went wrong with the socialist movement in the 20th century.
At the same time the anarchists showed they were capable of
organising the scale of struggle needed to threaten capitalism. In
the USA in the 1880's the anarchists were organising a huge campaign
for the 8 hour day involving demonstrations of greater than 100 000
workers. Here the anarchists showed their ability to connect
building for a socialist revolution with the winning of reforms from
the bosses. In 1886 this was to result in 8 anarchists being
sentenced to death in Chicago, an event May day originated in.
At the end of the century Anarchists in the US, most notably Emma
Goldman were to take up the fight to unionize women workers and
break the ban on contraception. At a time when most other
socialists saw women's liberation as a side issue the anarchists
were fighting against those aspects which most oppressed working
class women.
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
The anarchist fight against the use of parliament by socialists
continued when the Second international (labour party) was set up in
1889. Anarchists attempted to argue against reformism at the first
three international congresses in 1889, 1891 and 1893. The 1893
congress passed a motion excluded all non-trade union bodies which
did not recognise the need for parliamentary action. The next
congress in 1896 however included anarchists who had been made
delegates by trade unions. They were physically assaulted when they
attempted to speak and a motion from the German social-democrats
Liebknecht and August Bebel and Eleanore Aveling (Marx's
daughter) banned all those who were 'anti-parliamentarians' from
future congresses. The anarchists then went on to form their own
international, which still exists in the form of the IWA-AIT, an
international organisation of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and
groups.
The Russian revolution of 1917 confirmed the warnings made by the
anarchists some 50 years earlier in the first international. The
degeneration of the revolution was due to the attempt to use the old
state apparatus to introduce socialism and the Bolsheviks belief
that the working class were incapable of making the decisions
required to insure the revolution survived. Similarly in 1919 the
massacre of German workers by the German labour party confirmed the
anarchist warnings to the first and second international of the
logical outcome of parliamentary action.
The Russian revolution was the first real test of anarchism in a
revolution. The anarchist movement at the time was comparatively
small but it had major influence particularly in the factory
committees and in the Southern Ukraine. The anarchist were amongst
its foremost supporters and were the only group to support the
dissolving of the constituent assembly on the grounds that the
Soviets were a more democratic form of government. (In contrast the
Bolsheviks were clear that they wished to use the soviets rather
then the constituent assembly because they had more support in the
soviets).
The anarchists fought to push the revolution as far as it would go,
recognising that this would maximise the willingness of Russian
workers and workers internationally to defend it. When the
Bolsheviks started to impose their dictatorship the anarchists
fought them through the soviets and factory committees. By 1921 the
anarchists alone recognised that the revolution had been destroyed
and either died trying to bring about a third revolution or fled
into exile to warn the worlds workers of what had happened.
One major (correct) criticism of the anarchist tradition was that
during the Spanish revolution, four of the 'leaders' of the CNT went
into government. A sizeable portion of the anarchists in the CNT
formed the only consistent faction pushing for finishing off the
revolution. This group called the Friends of Durutti will discussed
in a later posting.
FASCISM AND WAR
After 1936 Anarchism in Europe was wiped out. From the rise of
fascism under Mussolini in Italy in the early 20's the anarchists
had stressed the need for workers to physically smash fascism. In
Italy at the time however there attempts to do so were undermined by
the Social-democrats. In Germany the anarchists were smashed by
Hitler as he came to power, many of them dying subsequently in
concentration or death camps. With the fascist occupation of Europe
during the second world war many of other anarchists were to share
their fate.
In Italy, France and Bulgaria at least there were anarchist
resistance groups throughout the war. In Italy they were involved
in the land seizures after the war but were defeated by the combined
forces of the Italian communist party and the Allies. In Bulgaria
the anarchist movement after the war grew rapidly but was wiped out
in 1948 by the Bulgarian C.P. Again hundreds were executed or sent
to concentration camps. Anarchists in Poland and other Eastern
European countries shared a similar fate.
Anarchism to-day is growing in all of the Eastern European
countries. As it was isolated for some 70 years in the soviet union
and 40 years in Eastern Europe it will be a slow and painful
process. In the west the anarchist movement grew slowly throughout
the 80's and is now in the process of re-examining the anarchist
tradition. Long years of isolation meant that a lot of rubbish has
accumulated so this re-examination is vitally important
The tradition in which the anarchists stand is one that socialists
need to identify with. For many on the left this will be a difficult
process. They were weaned on a diet of slander when it came to
anarchism, either being told that anarchists were police agents or
that they were not real socialists at all and wanted a return to
feudalism. We must resist the temptation to avoid this problem by
going "beyond anarchism". The state has been the Achilles heel of
20th century socialism, it is not an issue to be fudged.
Andrew